Posts by Disillusioned JW

30

Quoting out of context - ever justified?

by cognisonance in

jw literature on subjects such as creation vs. evolution often quote out of context, with the most recent material (the newest brochures) acknowledging that often those quoted to support the jw viewpoint do believe in evolution nonetheless.

sometimes indeed quotes in jw literature are just outright misquotes, leaving off preceding or succeeding words (or sentences) that would completely alter the meaning of the source sited (i.e.

carl sagans quote, the fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a great designer is indeed a flat out misquote).. .

Disillusioned JW

In my prior post where I said "As a read ..." I should have said "As I read ...".

30

Quoting out of context - ever justified?

by cognisonance in

jw literature on subjects such as creation vs. evolution often quote out of context, with the most recent material (the newest brochures) acknowledging that often those quoted to support the jw viewpoint do believe in evolution nonetheless.

sometimes indeed quotes in jw literature are just outright misquotes, leaving off preceding or succeeding words (or sentences) that would completely alter the meaning of the source sited (i.e.

carl sagans quote, the fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a great designer is indeed a flat out misquote).. .

Disillusioned JW

As a read many science books and science articles (especially about evolution) written from the 1950s to the present, I notice that many scientific ideas have become greatly modified over time, and in many cases even discarded. As a result I am not sure if the WT thinks they are being deceiving when they exclude from their quotes content by scientists which attempt to provide an explanation for perceived problems of biological evolution and of abiogenesis. Maybe in the minds of the writers of WT literature, the purported scientific explanations of apparent problems in evolution are erroneous (or very likely erroneous) and thus not necessary to include in quotes.

Even if the WT writers do think they are being deceiving (but without making an outright false quote and thus without making an outright intentional lie), they might be true believers in their religious sect/cult and in what they call creation science. Further, they might also feel justified in their handling of the quotes, thinking it is a part of theocratic warfare. Nonetheless, I think their handling of quotes is in many cases a mishandling of quotes and that it hides the truth from the readers of the WT literature - and that upsets me. It also greatly disturbs me that they often use very faulty logic in support of their teachings.

30

Quoting out of context - ever justified?

by cognisonance in

jw literature on subjects such as creation vs. evolution often quote out of context, with the most recent material (the newest brochures) acknowledging that often those quoted to support the jw viewpoint do believe in evolution nonetheless.

sometimes indeed quotes in jw literature are just outright misquotes, leaving off preceding or succeeding words (or sentences) that would completely alter the meaning of the source sited (i.e.

carl sagans quote, the fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a great designer is indeed a flat out misquote).. .

Disillusioned JW

Regarding Phizzy's comment about the WT brochure's quote of the book by Henry Gee, while the context in the book does say that the fossil found by Gee might be of a giant civet (though it also says that Gee thinks it might be ancestor of Gee) and that if so, "it would be the oldest known record of this species by a million years", the example of the possible civet fossil is used by Gee to illustrate the idea that because fossils don't come with a pedigree then there is no way to know if a specific fossil is an actual linear ancestor (direct ancestor) of the fossil of another individual or even of a specific species (and that is a major theme of Gee's book). As such, I think the WT's handling of the specific quote was not a misquote. Gee's book is also about the idea that family trees of specific species descending from other specific species presume far too much, and that cladistic diagrams should be used instead. The quote is from the first chapter of Gee's book, and that entire chapter of Gee's book is posted online at https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gee-time.html (that page also has a link to a review of the book). Here is a large context of the quote. [The boldfacing is mine.]

"Before I told everyone else about my own find, straddled on that ridge overlooking an expanse of space and, figuratively, an expanse of time, I wondered fleetingly if it might have been part of a hominid — perhaps half a tooth, like the one Gabriel found. In my mind I was already holding the fragment between finger and thumb, turning it over in the light. The question immediately presented itself: could this fossil have belonged to a creature that was my direct ancestor?

It is possible, of course, that the fossil really did belong to my lineal ancestor. Everybody has an ancestry, after all. Given what the Leakeys and others have found in East Africa, there is good reason to suspect that hominids lived in the Rift before they lived anywhere else in the world, so all modern humans must derive their ancestry, ultimately, from this spot, or somewhere near it. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that we should all be able to trace our ancestries, in a general way, to creatures that lived in the Rift between roughly 5 and 3 million years ago. So much is true, but it is impossible to know, for certain, that the fossil I hold in my hand is my lineal ancestor. Even if it really was my ancestor, I could never know this unless every generation between the fossil and me had preserved some record of its existence and its pedigree. The fossil itself is not accompanied by a helpful label. The truth is that my own particular ancestry — or yours — may never be recovered from the fossil record.

The obstacle to this certain knowledge about lineal ancestry lies in the extreme sparseness of the fossil record. As noted above, if my mystery skull belonged to an extinct giant civet, Pseudocivetta ingens, it would be the oldest known record of this species by a million years. This means that no fossils have been found that record the existence of this species for that entire time; and yet the giant civets must have been there all along. Depending on how old giant civets had to be before they could breed (something else we can never establish, because giant civets no longer exist so that we can watch their behaviour), perhaps a hundred thousand generations lived and died between the fossil found by me at site LO5 and the next oldest specimen. In addition, we cannot know if the fossil found at LO5 was the lineal ancestor of the specimens found at Olduvai Gorge or Koobi Fora. It might have been, but we can never know this for certain. The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.

...

A fossil can be thought of as an event in Deep Time. Compared with the immensity of time in which it is found, a fossil is a point in time of zero extent: a fossil either exists or it doesn't. By itself, a fossil is a punctuation mark, an interjection, an exclamation, even, but it is not a word, or even a sentence, let alone a whole story. Fossils are the tableaux that are illuminated by the occasional shafts of light that punctuate the corridor of Deep Time. You cannot connect one fossil with any other to form a narrative.

So there I was, confronted with a fossil that might have been half a tooth of a hominid, a scrap of flotsam from the ocean of time. Let us give a name — Yorick -- to its deceased owner. Yorick might have been my lineal ancestor; but we can never establish this for certain.

The events of Deep Time — fossils — are so sparse, because an animal, once dead, only rarely becomes a fossil. A million years passed between one fossil of Pseudocivetta ingens and the next. The process of fossilization and discovery is a concatenation of chance built upon chance. It's amazing that anything ever becomes a fossil at all.

...

The fact is that we know so little of the past. We depend on the minute fraction of the life that Earth has produced that has left any record. We have hardly begun to count the species with which we share this planet, yet for every species now living, perhaps a thousand, or a million, or a thousand million (we will never know for certain) have appeared and become extinct.

...

Because we see evolution in terms of a linear chain of ancestry and descent, we tend to ignore the possibility that some of these ancestors might have been side branches instead — collateral cousins, rather than direct ancestors. The conventional, linear view easily becomes a story in which the features of humanity are acquired in a sequence that can be discerned retrospectively — first an upright stance, then a bigger brain, then the invention of toolmaking, and so on, with ourselves as the inevitable consequence.

New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries 'missing links', as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. In reality, the physical record of human evolution is more modest. Each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.

...

In cladistics, presumptions about particular courses of ancestry and descent are abandoned as unprovable or unknowable. Yet cladistics does more than state that we are all cousins. It is a formal way of investigating the order in which organisms are cousins, by examining the possible alternatives. Cladograms are statements of collateral relationship of greater or lesser extent. Given that, they sidestep the question of whether Yorick is my ancestor, or if any fossil is the ancestor of any other, because the answer to these questions can never be known. In other words, cladistics acknowledges the discontinuities of Deep Time and, by acknowledging them, transcends them. "

As a result I found Gee's book useful for my research about evolution, but it is also depressing to me. It depresses me because it makes the strong case that we can never never know for sure if a specific extinct species (represented by specific fossils or by only one fossil) is the actual ancestor (linear ancestor/direct ancestor) of another specific species. Consider hominid evolution for example.

The more hominid fossils that are found the more hominid species are known to have existed, and these have many similarities with each other. As result it becomes increasing difficult to be confident of which species descended from a specific other species It even become hard to define which species to assign a particular fossil to. Hominid evolution is now thought of being much more like a bush (or a thicket) with numerous intertwined branches and twigs, than a tree. For example, the KNM-ER 1470 fossil was first assigned to Homo habilis, but many years later in science books it tended to be more commonly assigned to Homo rudolfensis, then later sometimes to Australopithecus rudolfensis instead, and now sometimes to Kenyanthropus rudolfensis instead.

For many years (especially until the fossil named "Lucy" was found") evolutionist anthropologists made family trees saying that our species descended from Australopithecus africanus, but years later the family trees in science books usually showed our species as not descending from Australopithecus africanus, though descending from Australopithecus afarensis (and sometimes also Homo habliis). [When Australopithecus africanus is shown these days in family trees, it typically is shown as leading to a dead end.] Many recent evolutionist biology books and evolutionist anthropology books don't even include family trees of hominids, instead they simply show a chart which indicates the time periods various hominid species existed and sometimes cladograms are also presented to indicate the relationships between the various hominid species.

For decades Homo erectus was presented as an ancestor of Homo sapiens, but now sometimes it is depicted as not being an ancestor of Homo sapiens. Instead of being shown as our ancestor some scientists assign some fossils to the species Homo ergaster - fossils that previously were assigned to Homo erectus (and that still are assigned to Homo erectus by other scientists). As a result, diagrams of family trees made by those scientists (the ones who split the species Homo erectus into Homo ergaster and Homo erectus) show our species, Homo sapiens, as having descended from Homo ergaster but not also from Homo erectus.

Thinking has also changed regarding the classification of Homo floresiensis. Initially it was thought to have descended (as a dwarf species) from Homo erectus, but now it is known to be more primitive than what researchers had thought. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-the-hobbits-of-indonesia-2012-12-07/ and https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/10/12/1480331.htm for more information about that new viewpoint.

31

If only someone had kicked my a$$.. (This is post is not for theists)

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

i think back on the 30+ years of bs as well as my fading almost a decade and even now being low key in person to hopefully save my nieces from the wt.

i'm a wreck in some ways.

i'm other days i'm stable however when it comes to theism i depart quickly and with anger!

Disillusioned JW

HowTheBibleWasCreated, I think it would be a good idea for your book (or some other book you might write) to not be exclusively with JWs in mind, but also for anyone else in a semi-fundamentalist Christian or fundamentalist Christian religion/sect/cult. Perhaps you did intend have it in mind for multiple groups of religious people. The book I am writing has that perspective (though it might include an appendix especially focused on JWs). For those who are in a religion/sect/cult that strongly discourages critical thinking and independent thinking, it will probably also have a section that gives a warning to them about such.

31

If only someone had kicked my a$$.. (This is post is not for theists)

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

i think back on the 30+ years of bs as well as my fading almost a decade and even now being low key in person to hopefully save my nieces from the wt.

i'm a wreck in some ways.

i'm other days i'm stable however when it comes to theism i depart quickly and with anger!

Disillusioned JW

ShotWhileTryingToEscape, I don't favor anyone (except maybe in dire situations, like those in a cult that will eventually order them to commit suicide) being "forced fed"; instead I am in favor of information and ideas being tactfully offered to people. Yes I had doubts years before I stopped believing in the religion. At around the age 12 I stopped believing that prayer works in post-biblical times (and I wasn't even certain if it worked in biblical times) and after that I never believed in prayer again as something that works in the modern world. I was baptized at a teenage age. When I gave prayers in the congregation from the platform, even as an MS, and especially during my last 5 years as a MS, I wondered what is the point of me giving these prayers. I gave them because it was a duty assigned to me.

The very hour after I got baptized I wondered if I made a mistake in getting baptized. That is because prior to getting baptized I heard someone in the congregation say that one will remember their baptism day all of their life as a special happy day, but I noticed that my baptism was anticlimatic. I didn't feel any different emotionally from being baptized than prior to baptism (probably largely because I had already been living as a JW since infancy) and I thus wondered why I didn't get an emotional experience. For awhile prior to getting baptized I wondered if evolution was true and for years after baptism (and off and on after that) I wondered if evolution was true. The very year I got baptized (months before getting baptized) I obtained issues of a science magazine that had information about human evolution (including famous recent hominid fossils which had been found) and of evidence for abiogenesis and the evolution of non-humans. I kept those articles for several years - longer than nearly all of my other science magazine articles up to that time. I kept them longer because I considered them the most interesting and the most important of the ones I had purchased.

I later got rid of them only because I thought I didn't need them, since the library has them and I wanted to reduce the clutter in my home. A few years after I became an atheist I bought copies (after very much searching) of the science magazines I had disposed of, and for the copies I couldn't buy affordably, I made photocopies (from the library) of the articles I liked.

12

I bought these two books out garage saleing

by mickbobcat in

the truth that leads to eternal life at a church rummage sale.

1968 printing and a 74 printing of god's eternal purpose now triumphing for mens good.

i know the truth book has some things in it that are a bit damning.

Disillusioned JW

Balaamsass2, have you been successful in getting JWs to doubt their religion by showing them things in the "Life Everlasting in the Freedom of the Sons of God " book and other old WT books?

31

If only someone had kicked my a$$.. (This is post is not for theists)

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

i think back on the 30+ years of bs as well as my fading almost a decade and even now being low key in person to hopefully save my nieces from the wt.

i'm a wreck in some ways.

i'm other days i'm stable however when it comes to theism i depart quickly and with anger!

Disillusioned JW

See https://www.blueletterbible.org/study/cults/exposejw/jw_chap3.cfm which gives a testimony of how a baptist became a JW and later how an ex-JW convinced the JW to resign as a JW (however the person did not stop believing in the Bible or Christianity). It is indeed possible to help to some JWs to see the truth.

31

If only someone had kicked my a$$.. (This is post is not for theists)

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

i think back on the 30+ years of bs as well as my fading almost a decade and even now being low key in person to hopefully save my nieces from the wt.

i'm a wreck in some ways.

i'm other days i'm stable however when it comes to theism i depart quickly and with anger!

Disillusioned JW

At a JW assembly (or convention) sometime between 1995 and 2005, there were so-called apostates protesting peacefully outside of the convention building (while the convention was in intermission, or maybe before the day's session started, or maybe after it ended). They had signs that listed dates pertaining to what the WT predicted would happen on those various dates, or of which they had said supposedly did happen). The dates included the following: 1874, 1878, 1914, 1925, 1975, and others. One sign (or a person speaking through a megaphone) urged JWs to read the April 1, 1972 Watchtower article called "They Shall Know a Prophet is Among Them" in which the organization called JWs a prophet. [That claim is important because if the WT claimed that JWs were prophets, while the WT was making false predictions (which the JWs had spread) that they claim they learned in some way from Jehovah God, then that would be proof that the WT is a false prophet. Most JWs are certain that the WT never claimed to be a prophet.] The ex-JWs from a distance told the JWs they don't need to talk to them (where other JWs could see them and thus get them in trouble for talking to 'apostates'), but instead that after they get home they can secretly look up the claims for themselves in the WT's literature, with the aid of the internet. I already knew that some of the dates pertained to failed predictions. Since I had doubts about the religion (even though I was probably still a MS at the time), I did secretly look up the claim about the WT saying the JWs were in some sense a prophet. I found out it was true (though the article by the Society had the word "prophet" in quote marks, perhaps to imply "like a prophet") and the failed predictions associated with various dates, and discovery of them made an impact on me! It made a difference. The so-called apostates were telling the truth - no lies (or even misleading statements/context) at all in what they said in their public protest and no lies (or even misleading statements/context) at all in what various ones had posted online (when quoting the WT literature, and in many cases they included images of the pages of the WT literature from which the quotes came from)! All of that made a big difference for me. I was stunned. Later in life, after I had stopped attending JW meetings (though I still attended the Memorial for several years until I became an independent Christian, which was before I became an atheist) I purchased books (mostly at a thrift store, but some through eBay) by Russell and Rutherford and I saw the dates in them and the failed predictions that were made about them. Such confirmed that the images I found online at 'apostate' sites were authentic copies of the WT publication's pages.

36

What useful piece of literature have the JW produced?

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

seeing on another post here about former jws throwing away literature.

i am curious as to the various opinions on there value.. for me i have been inactive for 3 years almost 4. i still have alot of books and of course all their bibles ever produced (except a few from the 1800s.).

in my opinion i think there are four books the jws produced that are useful:.

Disillusioned JW

Are any of the WT books very effective in helping to us to get some JWs to see problems with some of the WT's claims? If so, do we have to be PIMO (instead of out of the religion) in order to get JW's to read them? If so, which books are the best for that purpose? I don't attend JW meetings and thus I have no in-person access to the JWs who might be open to questioning the religion.

31

If only someone had kicked my a$$.. (This is post is not for theists)

by HowTheBibleWasCreated in

i think back on the 30+ years of bs as well as my fading almost a decade and even now being low key in person to hopefully save my nieces from the wt.

i'm a wreck in some ways.

i'm other days i'm stable however when it comes to theism i depart quickly and with anger!

Disillusioned JW

At times in my life, tactful direct argumentation with clear evidence from books would have helped me discover the truth much sooner than I did, especially if it were evidence for evolution and of problems with the Bible. That is because at various times in my life as a teenage unbaptized publisher, as a baptized JW in high school and college, and even as a MS, I sometimes wondered if evolution was true and if the JW religion, and even parts of the Bible, were false - but no one had personally presented clear evidence to me during those times.

Eventually the doubts caused me to become inactive (including ceasing meeting attendance of the JW religion) and focusing my attention on critically examining the JW religion and studying the Bible independently (using multiple translations and using Hebrew-Greek Interlinears and 'Christendom's' Bible commentaries and Bible Dictionaries and online articles). Later I had discussions on an online site with a local ex-Christian who was an atheist trying to convert people to atheism. When he pointed out some clear conflicts with the geologic record (which I had not known of) versus the Genesis creation accounts and flood accounts, and after a local Seventh-day Adventist on the same online site said the creative days in Genesis must have been meant to be understood as literal solar days (and stating reasons for the view), I immediately stopped believing the supernatural claims of the Bible (which was after I had already found serious contradictions in the Bible and other problems in the Bible) - including belief in Jehovah/Yahweh God, Jesus Christ, Satan the Devil, etc. A year later I became an outright positive/strong atheist - not merely a non-theist (who wondered if a deistic god or a pantheistic conscious god might exist). I became such an atheist after reading a comment by Steven Hawking in the news, saying science can now explain how the Big Bang and the universe started (or at least could have started) - without recourse to belief in any kind of god - even a deistic god.